My therapist suggested that I set aside 15 minutes a day for worrying, and to postpone any potential worries until that scheduled worry time. Well, I wasn't able to do that today.
Today someone was rude to me at my volunteer job and it totally shot my day to hell. For the entire rest of the day, I was unable to relax or enjoy my usual activities. I spent most of my day wondering why I react this way, whether I will ever be able to comfortably interact in regular everyday social situations, whether maybe I really don't like most people after all and I should just go back to being a hermit, etc., etc. It's time for bed, and I'm still up feeling all agitated. My back muscles are so tight that even shifting positions in my chair hurts.
I am so tired of this. I realize that I am making progress: I go out in public, I volunteer, I go to support groups, I see friends occasionally. I'm able to drive across town. I even got a part-time temp job- finally- and I start tomorrow. (I'll tell more about that sometime, maybe.) I'm just not making enough progress to achieve my idea of what a somewhat normal life would look like for me.
There were times in my life, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, when I could just think that people were bozos and then I could move on. Why can't I do that any more? It almost seems like I had a certain amount of capacity to deal with social unpleasantness, and I have exhausted the entire amount of capability I had- I exceeded my lifetime limit, and it's just plain gone. That's how it feels.
Today I was worrying about how I can ever hold a job successfully if I can't deal with other people evaluating me, or criticizing me, or saying anything that even remotely seems negative, or even looking at me the wrong way. I guess I'll just have to try.
Showing posts with label counseling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label counseling. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Saturday, May 5, 2012
I Liked Rehab Better Than My Job
Which would you prefer:
Going to your job every day for a month?
or
Going to a locked ward for alcohol/drug rehab for a month?
When I was in my 20's, I preferred the drug/alcohol treatment center to my daily working life. Not just once, but twice. I was working in a call center back then. At the time, I believed that being stoned or high made me better at my job, or at least happier.
I remember how sad and worried I felt when it was time to graduate from treatment and return to my real life. I liked rehab. We got to get up every morning and have a great breakfast together. Then we'd have classes about drugs and alcohol and their effects, therapy groups where everyone told fascinating stories and said all kinds of insightful things about life, and individual counseling sessions. My counselor was this big biker guy from San Francisco who really understood how I felt about things.
We also got to play pool (I was a pretty good pool player at the time, since I spent a lot of time in bars that had pool tables), gin rummy, and poker. I found most of my treatment center buddies to be very entertaining, interesting people. In the evenings we'd make popcorn, and we'd make little hors d'oeuvres out of the individually wrapped bologna and processed cheese slices that were provided in the hallway pantry refrigerators. We had movies to watch, too, like "Rocky" and "Grease".
It was nice of (name of major telecommunications company) to send me there twice. I'm not so sure most companies would be that understanding today.
I had this dawning awareness that your life shouldn't be something you want to escape. If you feel you need to be drunk or high to get through your day, then there's a problem.
I'm still clean and sober today, which is a good thing for me and everyone around me. Ironically enough, I still don't have the job thing figured out yet. It's a puzzle I want to solve. It's a scary challenge I want to overcome.
Going to your job every day for a month?
or
Going to a locked ward for alcohol/drug rehab for a month?
When I was in my 20's, I preferred the drug/alcohol treatment center to my daily working life. Not just once, but twice. I was working in a call center back then. At the time, I believed that being stoned or high made me better at my job, or at least happier.
I remember how sad and worried I felt when it was time to graduate from treatment and return to my real life. I liked rehab. We got to get up every morning and have a great breakfast together. Then we'd have classes about drugs and alcohol and their effects, therapy groups where everyone told fascinating stories and said all kinds of insightful things about life, and individual counseling sessions. My counselor was this big biker guy from San Francisco who really understood how I felt about things.
We also got to play pool (I was a pretty good pool player at the time, since I spent a lot of time in bars that had pool tables), gin rummy, and poker. I found most of my treatment center buddies to be very entertaining, interesting people. In the evenings we'd make popcorn, and we'd make little hors d'oeuvres out of the individually wrapped bologna and processed cheese slices that were provided in the hallway pantry refrigerators. We had movies to watch, too, like "Rocky" and "Grease".
It was nice of (name of major telecommunications company) to send me there twice. I'm not so sure most companies would be that understanding today.
I had this dawning awareness that your life shouldn't be something you want to escape. If you feel you need to be drunk or high to get through your day, then there's a problem.
I'm still clean and sober today, which is a good thing for me and everyone around me. Ironically enough, I still don't have the job thing figured out yet. It's a puzzle I want to solve. It's a scary challenge I want to overcome.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Workplace Phobia Articles, Research
There's a Wikipedia entry on Workplace Phobia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_phobia
In 2009, German researchers B. Muschalla and M. Linden published a study on Workplace Phobia entitled "Workplace phobia--a first explorative study on its relation to established anxiety disorders, sick leave, and work-directed treatment." Here's one link to it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19844838
And, an article in the UK Telegraph (mentions one of the same German researchers, Michael Linden):http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1561309/Work-phobia-an-anxiety-disorder-not-laziness.html
Here's a better link to the PDF of the article from Beate Muschalla from the German Journal of Psychiatry:http://www.gjpsy.uni-goettingen.de/gjp-article-muschalla.pdf
And here's one from allaboutcounseling.com: http://www.allaboutcounseling.com/library/workplace-phobia/
This amused me- From Wikipedia, a list of "Aspects of Workplaces" (look 'em all up when you have the time!) Wow, I can relate to a lot of these....
In 2009, German researchers B. Muschalla and M. Linden published a study on Workplace Phobia entitled "Workplace phobia--a first explorative study on its relation to established anxiety disorders, sick leave, and work-directed treatment." Here's one link to it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19844838
And, an article in the UK Telegraph (mentions one of the same German researchers, Michael Linden):http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1561309/Work-phobia-an-anxiety-disorder-not-laziness.html
Here's a better link to the PDF of the article from Beate Muschalla from the German Journal of Psychiatry:http://www.gjpsy.uni-goettingen.de/gjp-article-muschalla.pdf
And here's one from allaboutcounseling.com: http://www.allaboutcounseling.com/library/workplace-phobia/
This amused me- From Wikipedia, a list of "Aspects of Workplaces" (look 'em all up when you have the time!) Wow, I can relate to a lot of these....
- Absenteeism
- Aggression
- Bullying
- Conflict
- Control freak
- Counterproductive behavior
- Coworker backstabbing
- Cyber-aggression
- Democracy
- Deviance
- Discrimination
- Diversity
- Emotion
- Employee silence
- Employee surveys
- Empowerment
- Evaluation
- Feminisation
- Friendship
- Gender inequality
- Gossip
- Happiness
- Harassment
- Health surveillance
- Humor
- Incivility
- Intervention
- Jargon
- Listening
- Micromanagement
- Mobbing
- Morale
- Office politics
- Performance appraisal
- Phobia
- Privacy
- Probation
- Profanity
- Queen bee syndrome
- Relationships
- Revenge
- Romance
- Sabotage
- Safety
- Spirituality
- Staff turnover
- Strategy
- Stress
- Surveillance
- Toxic workplace
- Training
- Violence
- Wellness
Just for fun, let's find the Wikipedia link for "Toxic Workplace": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace
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